Big data will help India make a case on terrorism
Rather than getting tied down by bureaucratic red tape, New Delhi must back its case with numbers and analyses
Apart from plans to buy a fleet of commercial aircraft guaranteed to catch the attention of an anxious industry, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s upcoming visit to the United States is also expected to focus on Pakistan’s proxy wars against India.
As always when negotiating with the US, it is not only White House aides, bureaucracy and members of the Congress who matter, but also the think tanks and media who aim to influence policy at the Hill.
This is where the difficulty starts. Major think tanks in Washington have a different view on terrorism in the region. A prestigious think tank while classifying conflicts, cites Afghanistan as a ‘civil war’ on its interactive map. This flies against facts, given that almost the entire top Taliban leadership lives, strategies and banks in Pakistan. The term ‘Af-Pak’ itself illustrates the cross border pall under which the war is being fought.
Another think tank with an impressive ‘global’ database had put India at the eighth position on the top 10 countries affected by terrorism — and this based on attacks by Maoists as well as those by Northeast insurgents. In relative proportion, terrorism in Kashmir was only an ‘also ran’ position.
There’s also little awareness in India’s main terrorism plaint — take action against Pakistan as a terror sponsor. There’s little interest in its actions in Kashmir, apart from the fear that it occurs between nuclear rivals. The fact that Islamabad’s operations in Kashmir empower the deep state to play the same game in Afghanistan is hardly appreciated.
India does not make its own task any easier. In a world where big data lies at the centre of policy, New Delhi has no data to offer. The ministry of home affairs’ website ‘updates’ on Kashmir is more than a year old, and it requires an imaginative reading between the lines to understand its annual report.
Think tanks in India are hardly any better. Most offer opinion without hard data. Where is the data that can show that districts affected by terrorism are less than 10 and that the whole of ‘Kashmir’ is not affected by terrorism? Barring one, no one offers updated information on the JeM, at a time when India is working to get it notified as a terrorist group at the UN. Neither is there any precise coverage of the activities of the LeT in Afghanistan, as a direct threat to US troops.
In an information age, we are constantly bombarded by a ‘world according to some’ data that complicates the debate at home. It’s too late, besides being unwise, to hide behind bureaucratic red tape. Accept that he who provides the data, lives to close the file.